June 17 2007
Dr. Eduardo P. Garrovillas, Jose Rizal University
THE crisis in Philippine education is definitely very complex. Currently, there are three high-profile solutions being offered to address the crisis.
One. Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) has come up with its own solution to the problem. Composed of mega-business leaders in the larger society and business-based advocates for educational reform, PBEd is advocating the following: 1) adopt global standards by lengthening the basic education cycle from the present 10 years to 12 years; and 2) improve the resources made available to the education sector e.g., by offering better pedagogy, pursuing manageable pupil/teacher ratios, providing better textbooks, and improving the curriculum to at least include UNESCO’s "four pillars of education" (i.e., learning to be, learning to know, learning to do, and learning to live together) and to assist every school in the country to perform better. On the other hand, Education Secretary Jesli Lapus is "hesitant" to add two more years to the education cycle for obvious economic reasons. He believes that the education system’s problem is "primarily one of a lack of resources instead of simply a misallocation of resources". The education chief has cited that our neighbors in the ASEAN spend 20 percent of their national budget on education while we allocate only 12 percent. DepEd needs to fund the construction of 8,000 more classrooms and the hiring of 6,000 additional teachers for 2007, outside of the proposed R134 billion education budget, the bulk of which goes to the payment of salaries of teachers and personnel.
Two. Quite recently also, the Personnel Management Association of the Philippines (PMAP) offered its own solution to the problem. The group hosted a tripartite summit for government, industry, and academe to solve the mismatch between jobs offered and the skills provided by the country’s educational system. Human resource practitioners have been saying that the mismatch is "a weird sort of scarcity amid plenty that is being accentuated by the rapid growth of business process outsourcing (BPO) and the globalization of the Philippine labor market". The summit revealed interesting information on skills-jobs mismatch, as synthesized and articulated by Dr. Vincent K. Fabella, president of Jose Rizal University, who represented the education sector in his capacity as president of COCOPEA, the largest federation of associations of colleges and universities in the Philippines. He said that fastgrowing industries like pharmaceuticals, banking, consumer goods, hotels and restaurants, semiconductor, information technology, telecommunications, retail and call centers, are looking for people who have good communication skills combined with strong analytical and conceptual skills, are assertive, flexible and mature, have initiative, and possess a global perspective and socio-economic-political awareness -- basically "soft" skills that a good liberal education can provide. He added that while the country needs more technical human resources such as programmers, engineers, architects, physicists, welders and pipe fitters, the 21st century workplace and knowledge economy demand no less than a good liberal or general education for these people of the hard sciences to make a difference. Dr. Fabella asserted that universities must reengineer or kaizenize its liberal education curriculum; that there is a compelling need to strengthen it to complement the academic preparation of our graduates, especially from the technical or hard science courses, to be able to rise to the challenges of the 21st century workplace.
Three. Congress has proposed a "scientific solution" to the education crisis, which is to allocate a R4.7billion fund for its food for schools program or feeding program in the form of rice distribution to school children. They call it "scientific" because the proposal is allegedly backed up by scientific studies showing that malnutrition is behind the poor performance of our school children in Mathematics and Science, the reason why our pupils ranked 37th out of 38 countries who participated in international examinations for the said subjects. According to an Asian Development Bank study, poor nutrition among children can whittle down the IQ by 10 to 14 percent.
Synthesis. The first two solutions are neither foolproof nor perfect, but nevertheless each could merit a passing grade either under a preliminary evaluation or a cursory analysis as in a typical case-method classroom approach. Proposal one, for instance, in light of the global standards, should in fact be explored and pilottested by policy-makers and leaders of the basic education sector (elementary and high school), before it gets drowned out by protests from parents, or shut down by detractors of change. Specifically, it may be good to analyze whether the economic downside of adding two more years to the cycle could be offset by its resulting advantages over the long haul. On the other hand, for the tertiary level, solution two, the strengthening or kaizenizing of the liberal education curriculum to meet the needs of today’s workplace is quite doable vis-à-vis the growing accreditation mode among colleges and universities. It is also safe to conclude that solutions one and two are honest, objective, and wellmeaning attempts to solve the problem, bereft of any self-serving hidden agenda.
However, the third solution, being proposed by administration congressmen, is an insult to the intelligence of every decent-thinking Filipino. Rice distribution to school children is definitely not the solution to widespread malnutrition in our public schools, but rather and quite obviously, another fertile opportunity for graft and corruption. We will not debate on the science of malnutrition and its effect on IQ, but it doesn’t need a lot of brainpower to uncover the real motive. This is another form of a "grand deception", to borrow the words of the Supreme Court’s ponente on the infamous People’s Initiative. As viewed by many, the R4.7 billion feeding program for school children is another version of the fertilizer scam payola (R728 million) in the offing, only on a much bigger scale; a very obvious political gambit in the runup to elections.
The Filipino nation should commend PBEd and PMAP for their patriotic efforts to offer solutions to the Philippine education crisis and for their attempts to arrest the "downward spiral" of the quality of education in the country. They are lighting a candle; they are not cursing the darkness. Until a better alternative is found, quality education is still the key to national development and to our competitiveness in the global marketplace. Education is everybody’s business. It is too important to be left to the claws of rapacious and self-serving politicians.
